


Surgery

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Coffee, Conversations, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Girls with Guns, all kinds of longing, and sugar, killers and healers, scalpels and guns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 06:30:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1169796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It changes you, having put a bullet in someone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surgery

**Author's Note:**

> For femslash February, where slash means...something different.

 

It changes you, having put a bullet in someone. People who have find each other.They recognize, maybe, who’s killed, who’s touched that particular darkness and been able to go on, maybe even smiling, afterwards.

People need healing. They also need killing.

These things she doesn’t say, instead takes a sip from her cup, asks Molly,

“So. When did you first know?”

_That you could speak with the dead._

*****

“When I was twelve,” Molly says. That was when she heard the dead say, their lost voices coming to her out of teacups and kilts and kitten heels and moss,

_You are the last of the put-upon pathologists. No, you are a dead girl._

_“_ But I grew up in love with the living, you know? Was an only child. Had a boyfriend called Jim and a girlfriend named Charlie and a crush on everyone.”

“They left you with a mirror and a book and a lipstick and one place left to go.”

“Something like that.”

Molly tears open more sugar, taps with the spoon, hears that girlish voice, her own:

“What? Oh. You want me to…”

_That’s right_ , said a voice she didn’t recognize. _And step to, Molly-girl, we need you._

She did, wishing she could skip, skip the dead mice lined up in pairs by the cat on the doorstep. Disgusted mum, and she with the fingertip, tracing the silky smoke-sepia of the bodies, the fine long tails, hearing voices in the long shadows.

_They aren’t ghosts. They aren’t ghosts. They are the dead, and they want you for their own._

“And you? When did you know you wanted to be a nurse?"

_An assassin._

*****

“Oh,” Mary says, takes another sip, looks over the blue rim of the cup, “I was thirteen.” That first bloom and something else, something darker, that part of yourself not petal or pistil, not quite root either but that’s the idea.

_I could shoot, cut, kill if I had to._

There are things you don’t say.

“Always have been able to deal with the messes people make of themselves.”

Molly’s fingers close around the sugar, the salt.

A loop of shining hair trails into her coffee.

“Oh...damn!”

She lets Mary catch it, wipe it clean.

*****

_Step to, Molly-girl_ , said the dead.

“Over here,” said John, pointed while straight-backed Sherlock guarded the ocular.

In the lab, their heads together under the lights, and there she was with the lipstick and the implements, never picking the right people in which to bury her heart.

“I need you,” Sherlock said, and she couldn’t believe it, those eyes so alive, so full of stripped wonder at dead things.

_What’s wrong with us. What’s wrong with us._

“Nothing,” Mary says.

She takes her coffee black.

Trails a nail through spilled crystals.

*****

Oh, Molly thinks, dabs her mouth, of the first time she held a scalpel. The first time she cut flesh, parted it, peered shyly inside.

Touched brains, hearts, kidneys, parts.

Held his cold hands, said _go._

*****

Mary straightens the saucer.

“It won’t do to be hungry and untidy,” her mother said.

You eat and you clean up after.

You clean up after your own.

*****

_Did you always want to work with dead people?_

_Did you always want to make them that way?_

_What’s it like to fake a death?_

_How many have you killed?_

_Would you kill for someone you loved?_

_And you?_

There are things you don’t ask, don't say.

*****

Afternoon blue on formica. Their hair like citrine and salt. Sweet smells from not far.

“That’s something you have in common with John, yeah? The …fixing. Tending.”

_The killing._

“Yeah, I suppose. He more than I, really. Do you ever want to…”

_Kill anyone._

“Deal with live patients? No. Brains in a basin, that’s me.”

Giggle. Tilt heads. Take a sip.

“Let’s…”

“Order some sweets, shall we?

_Yes._

The biscuits are hearts and fingers, wet with cream and dark with jam. Laugh again at that.

“I’ve just come from an autopsy.”

“I’m pregnant, I’ll eat anything.”

“I loved anatomy,” Molly says, “I mean… still do.”

“What’s not to like?”

*****

Traffic hissing. London riding its edge. Two cups on the table. Two faces reflected, transected by light.

*****

“What I remember best…” Molly says, takes out some coins.

“The first time you lost someone,” says Mary, “saw him go.”

“Yeah,” Molly says, “something like.”

_Causes of death: blood loss, shock, massive trauma, organ failure, fall from a great height, total collapse._

_Bullet. Blade. Human hands._

*****

“Thank you, Molly Hooper,” Sherlock said.

_For killing me, for watching me die, for keeping me that way._

She watched something leak from his light eyes.

Watches Mary stand, tuck her arms into her coat, scarlet, lean in glowing for goodbye.

“Do this again, shall we?”

“'Course.”

_Step to, Molly-girl_ , said the dead.

Mary goes.

*****

On the way home it’s John’s hands she thinks about, so steady on a blade, a trigger.

_Mary, love._

The way he said it, says it sometimes. Like it’s sharp.

John's hands on Sherlock's scapulae.

“That was,” Sherlock said, “surgery.” He meant the bullet that traced, skipped his fifth thoracic, ripped a hole, brought shock and stopped his heart. Twice.

That’s what he meant.

Well that’s it, isn’t it. All of this, all of it.

What kills us, what makes us live.

The precise way in which we are opened.

 

**Author's Note:**

> "In the moment between  
> the old heart and the new  
> two angels gather at the empty chest. "--Dana Levin, "In the Surgical Theatre"


End file.
